Moments are frozen instants in the flow of time. Our life is about moments. Most art, but especially photography, is about capturing moments.
Flow of time
Time is like a stream flowing around us. It goes from infinity to infinity as far as we can perceive. But we can’t stop it or dam it up. We can’t even jump in the stream and ride a moment forever. Instead, we must watch it flow by and hear the clock ticking.
Time itself may be virtually infinite, but our time is not. We have been alive a certain time, but we have no idea how long we have left. There may be many years left, or our time may be done tomorrow.
Many of us live our lives as if we have infinite time left. That is simpler and less troubling than acknowledging the impermanence of our existence. So, we become numb to the passing of time. We bury our self in our job or other responsibilities or diversions. Days flow into weeks into months into years and we barely realize it. Someday we look back and wonder where the time went.
All we can clearly perceive is the current moment we are living in. The past is a sequence of moments that are gone. The future is a potential sequence of moments we cannot yet see.
A characteristic of a lot of art, especially photography, is that it records moments. They may be beautiful moments, or touching ones, or poignant ones, or frightening ones. But the moment itself is the art.
Art portrays these moments so we can look at them from outside the time stream. It gives us a new perspective on the moment. Whether the art captures the moment as a 2-dimensional image to hang on our wall, or a 3-dimensional form, or a poem or story we can visit whenever we want, they re-create for us a moment or a scene we want to save.
One of the powerful aspects of our art is that it is concrete. That is, it is fixed, unchanging, staying as it was created. This plucks moments out of the stream of time and preserves them for us, beautiful and unchanging. A photograph is a frozen moment.
What we remember
Our memories are really a collection of remembered moments. Do you remember what you did at your job last month? Probably not, but you remember that time last month when your boss came to you and praised you on doing a great job on something.
Do you remember college? Or is your memory based on some great times, some miserable times, a time when a professor said something that opened a whole new world of thought for you?
In our lives and with our families we tend to remember events, certain happenings – in other words, moments. Everything else is just a blur.
Astounding moments are flowing by us all the time. Mostly, we don’t notice. Those moments are lost and can never be regained.
Mindfulness is a practice of being aware and “in the moment.” It attempts to let us forget the past and not worry about the future but instead be very aware of what is happening right now.
Being mindful is a good thing, but when you look up “mindfulness” it often gets co-opted by types of eastern mysticism. Ignore that. The concept is simple, even if the practice may be hard.
When I say we should be mindful I simply mean we should practice greater awareness of the world around us and the way we are responding to it. As artists this is especially important. There is beauty and interest almost everywhere. Fascinating moments are happening all the time wherever we are. Mindfulness is teaching our self to see them. We must notice moments.
This usually involves unplugging from our technology and stepping away from the fast pace of our lives for a bit. A walk is a great tool for me. Being outdoors and getting exercise helps me see more of what is going on. Of course, this only works if we put the phone in our pocket and take off the headphones, freeing our self from our tether to the machine.
But being there and seeing the moments are two different things. We must be open to the experience. Pause and marvel at small moments. At common, ordinary things around us that can become magical sometimes.
The way we live our moments is the way we live our lives.
By its nature, photography is about capturing moments. The shutter opens on a scene in the “real world” for a fixed slice of time. The sensor records what is happening during that time slice. What we get is not imagined or fake. We have captured a moment. If we are good, it is a worthwhile moment.
Of course, I can create fantasy art that is impossible or surreal. I enjoy doing that. But most photography is a relatively straight capture of a real scene.
The typical photograph is a portrait of a moment. It is not the moment itself, but an abstract image of it. We have plucked it out of the stream of time and set it aside for contemplation, to show other people what was there that they could have seen. Since there is such a rich flow of moments passing before us, one of the challenges is to develop the experience, the “eye”, to recognize a worthwhile moment as it is happening. In a sense, what Henri Cartier-Bresson called a “decisive moment”.
Shoot it when you see it. Painters may be able to hold a moment in their memory well enough to be able to sketch and paint it back at their studio. But photographers must react immediately. Capture it or lose it. The famous Jay Maisel so rightly said “Always shoot it now. It won’t be the same when you go back.“
Even in the realm of photography, there is the special case of the print. A print takes this fleeting moment and casts it in a permanent form onto a substrate like paper or canvas or metal.
The moment becomes a real object. It has weight and form and texture. This is important because by being an object of substance, we have a different relationship with it. An ephemeral moment has been transported to a physical object we can see and touch and hold.
Even more, it has permanence. Memories are unreliable things. They fade and change. A print holds the moment up for us to see for many years to come. We can come back to it and relive it at will. Maybe only to remind ourselves that great moments are happening all the time and we should be more mindful of them.
In computer speak, a print is read-only-memory. That is a technology that, once written, can never be altered. Once the print is printed, it is an unchangeable record of the artist’s intent at that moment. The digital file can be altered and a new, modified print can be created, but the original print is fixed for its lifetime.
A print celebrates a moment that is worth keeping among the continuous flow of time.
Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.
Be intensely aware of moments. They are our life. Each moment we have should be precious to us. Don’t let them drift away unnoticed.
As photographers, we should be on the lookout for the moments we want to record. To do this we must be very aware of the world around us, mindful, in other words.
We have the privilege of capturing moments and presenting them to people so they can marvel at the moments that have gone by. This is one of the things artists do. This is awesome.
This is scheduled to come out New Year’s Eve (on the Western calendar). This is going to be mainly a new year’s greeting. I am going to ramble on non-photographic topics this time.
Reflection
It is just a date on a calendar, but there is something about a new year that makes us thoughtful. Maybe it is the act of having to take one calendar down and replace it with a nice new one – if you still use paper calendars. That seems to make it clear that an old year has ended and a new one is starting.
Whatever the reason, there seems something more solemn than the Times Square ball dropping. We think to the past and the future.
Looking back
Despite our social media profiles that show everyone constantly happy and successful, we know that is not true. It is the illusion we want to have everyone believe.
The reality is we are all human and share the human condition. We get sick. We have conflicts. People close to us move away or die. Some of us lost our jobs this year.
But, on the other hand, most people recover from illness, new jobs are found, new friends are made, babies are born. We see that life goes on.
Life is a churning mix of good and bad. Sometimes we are being tossed in the waves rather than surfing skillfully on top. But we rise. How we rise depends on our attitude.
Some ride these waves better than others, even though the problems are the same. Please let me suggest that one of the big differences is our faith. What is your faith centered in? How strong is it? A strong faith in God goes a long way toward helping us take a long view that things will work out for our good, because we know that right here, right now is not all we have to look forward to.
Looking forward
That new calendar you hang up is empty. Waiting to be filled with all of our activities. Over the course of the year, it will mark what we choose to do, where we spend our time, what we consider important.
Right now, it has the promise of a blank page. We can choose what to write. That seems to be what occupies our thoughts at this time.
Many of us make “New Year’s Resolutions.” Suggestions to ourselves of things we would like to do different the next year. I have stopped making New Year’s resolutions. A resolution has no weight of commitment. It is just saying some should do’s: I should lose weight, I should get more fit, I should go back to school and get a new career.
Let me suggest this is a good time to actually commit to a different path. If fitness is your problem, decide what kind of exercise is best for you, make a realistic plan – not “6-pack abs in 2 weeks”, and commit yourself to doing it. Start today. No excuses.
Whatever we choose to do requires determination. January 1st all the usual problems and demands start piling up. They fill our time and thoughts and quickly sweep away resolutions. Let your commitments stand strong. If you don’t make it happen, they will not get done.
The things we don’t do are often the things we regret most later in life.
Place of photography
Photography is very important to me. But it serves as a creative release I need. It is not the core of my life. I suspect it is the same for you.
If it is important but not the center of our world, we must look at it correctly.
We have a life to live that is not totally centered on photography. We must earn a living and probably support other people, we have family and friends who are very important to us, we take vacations, we learn, we take care of ourselves physically.
Life goes on. Photography is an important part of what I am, but not the center. I am much more than a photographer. I photograph when life lets me. After I take care of the important things.
Best wishes
I wish you sincere best wishes for the year ahead. I hope you will have clarity of purpose and alignment with your faith. Take care of yourself and others around you. And I hope you will shoot some amazing pictures!
Good general advice is that we should photograph subjects we love. I want to bend it some and suggest we love the one you’re with.
Love our subjects
It seems good advice to say we should concentrate on photographing subjects we love. Then we will feel a strong draw and affection for it. We will think more and look deeper into what it means and what it can be.
We see it all the time. Some photographers only shoot landscape, others only portraits. People focus exclusively on food photography or mini-figures or architecture. There are hundreds of specialties.
That’s great. I agree that if we have an affinity for a subject, we should photograph it. It will be fun and rewarding. But it can be limiting.
But what if your only true photographic love is reefs in Fiji, or volcanoes in Iceland, or hidden temples in Malaysia? Unless you are retired with fat investments, most of us would not have the opportunity to do that very often.
Have you painted yourself into a corner in that case? Do we have to resolve that there’s nothing for me to shoot here where I live? I must wait until I can go to my dream location. But when I get there someday, I will kill it.
For some reason I was reminded of the very old song by Stephen Stills, “Love the One You’re With“. Yes, I go back that far. I don’t remember hearing it recently, but this idea of shooting what you love must have triggered it.
The main theme of the song is “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with”. That is so 1970’s. It is good advice for causal relationships with groups of friends, but terrible advice for couples. But no marriage counseling here.
Love the one you’re with
Yes, it is great to be able to photograph the subjects and themes you love. But we don’t always get to do that. I recommend adopting a more mindful attitude of being attuned to what is around you.
If you are so exclusive that you will only photograph certain subjects I suggest getting checked for obsessive/compulsive tendencies. You are passing by many joys of discovery that happen when you let your curiosity take you down unexpected paths. And being so selective means, you miss the practice that comes from taking the opportunity to explore how to photography other things. Anytime we use our camera to take a picture, we are practicing our craft.
Instead of waiting exclusively for the thing you love, fall in love with what you find. It is great photographic practice, it is great mindfulness exercise, it keeps you engaged where you are, and you might find new love interests.
Accepting the challenge of photographing things you did not know you were interested in requires re-orienting your mindset. It is that scary idea of practicing mindfulness.
Mindfulness used to have a negative connotation for me. I associated it with some of the ridiculous examples I see on the internet involving a deep spiritual philosophy, incense, yoga poses, chants, and, what seemed to me to be mind games. It is that for some.
But I already have a strong spiritual path, I don’t bend the way a 20-year-old yoga instructor does, and if I started changing mantras, I would burst out laughing at myself. Few of those things have much to do with photography, in my opinion.
Mindfulness in our art involves the mental discipline of staying aware of what is around us. Looking, being in tune with what is there, being receptive. And, going back to the original idea of this article, looking for and learning to appreciate the interest, even beauty, in what we find. Even to the extent of falling in love with the ordinary things around us.
Exercises like 52 Week Photo Challenges are popular. That is one reason there are so many of them. I know from experience that they are good learning experiences. They keep us trying new things and having to creatively find a solution for a word problem.
I don’t do these anymore, but mostly because am not competitive and because I find so many challenges around me all the time that I don’t want to distract myself. That’s just me. Don’t let me discourage you if you have not tried it.
If you are not going to do one of these scripted challenges, I encourage you to challenge yourself. Ignore your one great subject love. Go out wide open. Turn off the music and your phone. Walk around and look around. “Force” yourself to look more closely at what is there. Determine that you are going to shoot things you never photograph. See something and think “that is mildly interesting; how could I make it very interesting?” Discover that there are endless possibilities besides what you normally focus on.
it seems like I often come around to the idea of mindfulness in our photography. I guess it is one of my ongoing themes. Mindfulness seems to be joined to creativity. Mindfulness helps us discover interesting things. Creativity stimulates us to do something interesting with them.
Photography is a craft we traditionally spend years learning and practicing. What if we could shortcut all that and have some “hacks” that would let us make great images with little work or training?
The click bait
It seems like I am getting more and more click bait like this (actual names redacted to protect their anonymity, and to not support their sales offer):
Most photographers spend years trying to figure it all out on their own—slow progress, scattered tutorials, lots of frustration.
But what if you could skip that?
What if this is the year you jump straight to clarity, consistency, and results? That’s exactly what the [program name] gives you: the proven system that pros actually use.
If you’re at the bottom of the learning curve this seems attractive. Who wouldn’t want to be able to leapfrog to the top of your game with little effort? This would save years of hard work.
For a little money, I could buy my way to success, fame, and fortune. I could become a respected artist quickly. What’s not to like?
There are 2 things: there is no secret knowledge, and it still involves a lot of hard work and learning.
It is a popular and successful sales pitch to insinuate that there is secret knowledge known only by elite practitioners in a field. If someone shares this secret knowledge with you (for a fee), you, too, can be one of the elites.
The problem with this is that photography does not rely on secret knowledge. Rather than being a closed league, like a guild, the field is very open. Most photographers readily and openly share their knowledge and insight.
Why would they make all this knowledge available? I think it is for 2 reasons.
First, many photographers rely on workshops and book and tutorial sales to supplement their income. It is just a reality. The number of people who live solely on image sales is relatively small.
Second, they know their knowledge is not secret. It does not need to be closely guarded, because it is wisdom based on years of experience. Every photographer who has been in the game long enough basically knows the same things. Most of the ones I know are eager to share their experience and help others benefit.
Learning required?
Are there “hacks” you can use to get you where you want to go faster? Maybe. Depending on where you want to go.
If you are the family photographer, there are simple things you can learn to make your images more enjoyable. Making yourself aware of the lighting and how to control it, framing the subject more deliberately, using shallow depth of field to isolate, and seeking a “decisive moment” are techniques to raise yourself above the norm.
Or if you want to make your vacation pictures less boring to others, there are “hacks” that can be used. Learning to see and use the light, actively looking at what is going on all around your frame, use wide and close and high and low views. Culling out most of your shots will help a lot, too.
If these are the kind of specific goals you have, then certainly learn the “tricks” and be satisfied. You will take better pictures but not be an artist.
So, what is the goal? Many people, probably most people, only care about getting a decent shot to put on social media or in a memory album. I do not criticize this at all. That is where their values lie. Learn some simple techniques that will improve your photos.
But if you aspire to be an artist, if your goal is to make creative and interesting images that express your point of view, that is an entirely different path. If you go to photography school, you will learn techniques like I described above. Probably in the first semester. Then you will be pushed onward to learn actual image making.
Creativity is hard. You must know the basics of the craft very well, but then you must develop your own unique way of seeing and have something to say. It goes far beyond just being able to take a good picture.
Are there shortcuts?
The ad I quoted talks about “slow progress, scattered tutorials, lots of frustration” being involved in the way photography is usually learned. Maybe they have synthesized a program that guides a person through this messy time. Or maybe they just have a rigid program to follow to make a novice a clone of the instructor.
I believe. that learning to be a creative photographer is hard work. Personally, I don’t think there is a reasonable shortcut. A good mentor can help immensely by pointing things out and giving good feedback. But you still must do the work. It is long and frustrating and sometimes you want to give up. We want to be progressing faster, but we don’t seem to be getting there yet.
Henri Cartier-Bresson famously noted “Your first 10,000 photos are your worst.” That is true. It does not, however, mean your next 10,000 will be great. As someone who has shot many multiples of 10,000, I know that it is a long and difficult road.
But we keep pushing, because something compels us to do it. Psychologists tell us we learn more from failures than from successes. As aspiring artists, we generate a lot of learning opportunities. And we do learn. Practice and ruthless evaluation eventually pays off.
An elephant in the room these days is AI. Won’t AI provide the shortcuts we want? Can’t we rely on it to make our images better?
Yes, we can. It already happens every day with AI “enhancements” when we take a picture with our phone. And there are many AI “enhancements” that can automatically be applied to our images in Lightroom or Photoshop or whatever your tool of choice is. It will only get more powerful and more pervasive.
If your goal is to make your image better, then yes, it will be glad to do it for you. But you didn’t do it. And by letting AI do it, you didn’t learn how to do it better next time. We become a tool of the machine rather than it being the other way around.
If our goal is to become a creative artist, my opinion is that this is going the wrong direction. An artist is responsible for all the creative decisions in making an image. We delegate some simple things to our tools, like when I put my camera on Aperture mode and let it choose the shutter speed based on the aperture I selected. That is a simple technical calculation, it is not taking creative responsibility for the image.
Maybe AI is one thing driving the resurgence of photographers shooting film and doing chemical darkroom work. They remain firmly in charge of all aspects of their image.
In my blog I have given some glimpses of my culling and evaluation techniques. I will not describe them in detail, just to say that I do not use a basic 5-point ranking scheme. My images must go through several rounds of critique and editing to progress up to my top set. The ones I would be proud to show anyone.
Recently I was going back through to catch up on my backlog of hundreds of images that are still “in progress”. It is a time to look realistically at each image and decide if it deserves to be promoted to the next level.
An interesting thing occurred. Having to revisit these hundreds of images, I couldn’t help thinking that I have been making some pretty good and occasionally creative pictures. I shoot so much that I sometimes forget to look back and see the arc that is traced by the past. It was encouraging.
Art is hard
Becoming a better picture shooter is easy. Becoming an artist is hard. It involves lots of learning and practice and self-examination. And suffering. At least the mental suffering of falling short of your expectations. But even then, there is no certificate, no award ceremony, nothing to tell you that you have arrived. You keep pushing and reaching forward.
It takes time and effort. I do not believe there are any magic shortcuts that will get you where you need to go. Put in the work. Put in the time. It is worth it.
We all have different interests, which triggers different perceptions of things around us. What do you see? That determines a lot about what you will photograph.
Visual mechanics
If we are an average human beings, we have fairly similar optical equipment. We have rods and cones, corneas and irises, an optical nerve. In the brain we have the occipital lobe doing the major image processing, the parietal lobe handling spatial recognition, and the temporal lobe interfacing to memory. Memory is important to the scene recognition process.
This is fascinating in a general way, but I’m not interested in any of that for this discussion. I don’t care about the mechanisms of how we see.
If I was shopping for a car and the salesman insisted on going on in great length about the design details of the engine, he would probably lose a sale. I’m not uninterested in that, but I am more interested in what the car will do for me.
In a similar way, I’m not very interested in the mechanism of sight. I want to know how we use our vision. Why do we see what we see? Do we see the same things others around us see?
I refer to this as our perception. That is not based on how well our visual system works, but in what we are drawn to notice and decide to photograph. Basically, what we choose to see.
I have heard it said that if you take 2 photographers and put them side by side in a 10×10 foot area they couldn’t leave and have them take pictures, they would be different. Sure, they would image many of the same subjects, but their work would be different. One may favor wide angle shots taking in all the field around them. The other may favor telephoto views narrowing in on details. Even if they used the same cameras and lens, their compositions would be distinct. Basically, they are perceiving different stories. They see and feel different things.
I haven’t tried this literal experiment, but I have been on photo walks where a group traveled through the same area for an hour or two. When we compared results there were significant differences in treatments and subject selection. We each had different perceptions.
To me, our perception is closely related to the insight we bring to a scene or subject. Insight in the sense of intuition. A Psychologist’s definition of insight is “when a solution to a problem presents itself quickly and without warning.” I believe that is too limited for our application to photography.
I prefer to broaden it to include more of our consciousness. The term noesis better captures it. Very simply, it is “the power of acute observation and deduction, discernment, and perception.”
In our photography, that is basically saying we are looking, we recognize the interest to us, and we know what to do with it. That allows that we could be intentionally looking to photograph the subject, or we may just suddenly recognize that it is interesting. But either way, our perception is working, our eyes are open, and our mind is engaged.
Selective attention
Most people are not open and engaged most of the time. We are glued to our tiny screens for much of our day. Even when we put them down, we tend to be lost in thought about our to-do list or an important meeting coming up or a problem we are trying to solve.
It is a human tendency to have tunnel vision when we are worrying or focused on a problem. Psychologists call this selective attention. There is an old but famous video used as an experiment in this. Try it before reading ahead to the next paragraph. Really focus on counting the passes.
Did you notice the gorilla? About half the people who are concentrating on counting the passes didn’t. This is selective attention. Even when something bizarre passes through our field of view, we can miss it completely because we are concentrating on something else.
There is a second finding that came out of this. Most of the subjects who missed the gorilla were very surprised they had done it. They seriously overestimated their ability to multitask. It seemed inconceivable to them that they could miss something so obvious.
When we have the privilege of getting in the “doing photography” mode, whatever that means for you, we must fight to free ourselves from the things that are stealing our attention.
When we are distracted, we will miss amazing things. Doing photography means to take ourselves out of this, to invert our attention to what’s going on around us, to be receptive.
This is being open. It is letting the noesis I described earlier function: “the power of acute observation and deduction, discernment, and perception.”
There is power in this. It turns simple seeing into deep observation and insight. We are aware of relationships and gesture and color and composition and beauty and detail that would otherwise flow by unobserved and unrecorded. It allows us to capture moments that others around us did not perceive.
I love it when I show someone an image and they say ‘Wow, I pass by that every day and I have never noticed it!” I treasure a memory of one time when I was setting up to take a picture and a woman passing by dismissively said “I don’t see anything interesting here.” But I did. That was satisfying.
It is very natural to be thinking about our daily worries. I can’t help you with that. I do too. But some of our significant distractions are self-inflicted. If we are photographers, I believe we need to set aside blocks of time where we put the phone down and out of sight and pay attention to what we are missing all around us.
We only have a certain amount of attention. Moment by moment we choose what to spend it on. Multi-tasking is very ineffective for creative tasks. When we try to do our art and something else, both will suffer.
One joy of being a photographer is that we can give ourselves permission to step out of the flood that carries most people along. Picking up our camera is an excuse and an opportunity to be immersed in the moment, in a creative flow. Eyes open, mind engaged, not distracted. This is tremendously energizing. It makes us feel very alive. We start to see.
We photograph what we are looking at. That’s the direction our head is pointing, so that is where our field of vision is. That limits what we could see. But what are we seeing? That is our choice. We “see” with our mind. What we notice in our field of view is determined by our interests and curiosity. With practice and experience we can learn to see more. To more clearly see things that are not obvious to other people.
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer
©Ed Schlotzhauer